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Essay Samples on Citizenship

What is patriotism: exploring the essence of love for one's country.

Patriotism, a sentiment deeply ingrained in the human spirit, is often described as the love, loyalty, and devotion one feels towards their homeland. It is an emotion that transcends geographical boundaries, uniting individuals under the banner of shared identity and pride. Patriotism has been the...

• Citizenship

Civic Literacy and Its Importance in the 21st Century

Introduction Today, in the 21st century, societies are dependent on the people’s ability to read, hear, write (literacy) and understand the issues of the day. It is a must for the citizens to understand economic issues, laws made by politicians and other problems in order...

Should Illegal Immigrants Become Legal Citizens

Have you ever imagined a world where everyone is treated equally? A world where there are no borders to separate countries, or where everyone is a citizen, living all together as humans with no inequality that could separate them depending on where they are coming...

• Illegal Immigration

Becoming A Good Responsible Citizen In Democratic Society

In what way can leaners’ ability to become active citizens be enhanced? What knowledge, skills and values do they need to possess and flourish as active democratic citizens? The European Economic and Social Committee (2012) defines active citizenship as: the glue that keeps society together…....

• Civil Rights

Values And Responsibilities Of An Active Citizen

Nelson and Kerr (2006) explains active citizenship as being “fundamentally about engagement and participation”. This type of engagement can be either “citizens engaging with the state” (electoral) or “citizens engaging with and among themselves” (civic) (GGLN, 2013, p.12; Annette, 2008). Active citizenship has become one...

• Social Responsibility

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The Rights And Responsibilities Of A Citizen In America

In order to be eligible to vote for any government election, there are requirements that need to be met; being eighteen years old by election day, a citizen of the United States, meeting your state residency requirements, and being registered to vote by your state’s...

• Individual Rights
• Responsibility

Exploring Citizen's Engagement And Responsibilities Of A Citizen

This paper examines in a first place different forms of citizen’s engagement and his responsibilities toward society. In a second place, it discusses the background or the framework of these forms. What is the social role of a citizen? How valid morality could be the...

Ideal Good Citizen In A Totalitarian Government

Why would any person or government suppress its own people? Throughout history, different forms of government have been developed with varying intentions. The leaders in these governments adopt ideologies that may either promote an inclusive government where citizens are involved in the decision making or...

• American Government

Pros And Cons Of Providing Us Citizenship To Central American Refugees

I am torn on what side to pick. I can see both, the positive and negative, on providing automatic U.S. citizenship to Central American children who come to the U.S. by themselves in order to escape violence in their home countries. The negative part about...

• Cultural Identity

Corporate Citizenship in the U.K. and the U.S.

Corporate citizenship is the new social identity supposing an important role in a firm’s life in the U.S. and Europe today. It is not enough for companies to generate a profit. U.S. and European citizens expect them to generate a profit and conduct themselves in...

Birthright Citizenship as the Key Factor of Equality in USA

Birthright Citizenship refers to the law that resulted from the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution that took place around 148 years ago. This declares all the children who are born on US soil as legal US citizens. This right is often referred as jus...

Black Opinion on Immigration, Citizenship & the Role of White Supremacy

In Niambi Michele Carter’s book American While Black, she analyzes black responses to immigration, developing a term “conflicted nativism” that she uses to describe black views on immigration and citizenship. This term is developed throughout the book through historical analysis and a case study approach...

• African American History

Discussion of Citizenship Without Equality in Rankine's and Shakespear's Beliefs

At present, our society is facing various social inequalities. A significant problem is discrimination against minorities in the community and workplace. These minorities are neglected and concealed of these inequalities also by the media. Citizenship is crucial to this issue because it has always been...

Literature Review Of Living Conditions Of The Lower-Class Citizens In Hong Kong

Hong Kong is in Eastern Asia; they are southeast of China and southwest of Taiwan. It has a population of 7.4 million people and a size of 2755 km2. Hong Kong is an international financial hub that is extremely crowded so living space is limited....

• Social Class

Best topics on Citizenship

1. What is Patriotism: Exploring the Essence of Love for One’s Country

2. Civic Literacy and Its Importance in the 21st Century

3. Should Illegal Immigrants Become Legal Citizens

4. Becoming A Good Responsible Citizen In Democratic Society

5. Values And Responsibilities Of An Active Citizen

6. The Rights And Responsibilities Of A Citizen In America

7. Exploring Citizen’s Engagement And Responsibilities Of A Citizen

8. Ideal Good Citizen In A Totalitarian Government

9. Pros And Cons Of Providing Us Citizenship To Central American Refugees

10. Corporate Citizenship in the U.K. and the U.S.

11. Birthright Citizenship as the Key Factor of Equality in USA

12. Black Opinion on Immigration, Citizenship & the Role of White Supremacy

13. Discussion of Citizenship Without Equality in Rankine’s and Shakespear’s Beliefs

14. Literature Review Of Living Conditions Of The Lower-Class Citizens In Hong Kong

• Gender Stereotypes
• Social Media
• Gender Roles
• National Honor Society
• Uncertainty Reduction Theory

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Essays on Citizenship

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• Citizenship

Essays on Citizenship

In your citizenship essay, you can explore different aspects of citizenship and how to acquire it. Citizenship essays define citizenship as one of the main concepts that indicate the belonging of a person to a certain state, from this connection arise the mutual rights and obligations of the state and its citizen, their responsibility to each other. Each country independently determines the set of rights and obligations that citizens have to follow, so many essays on citizenship explore or compare citizenship of different countries. Citizenship as social status is given from the moment of birth. Sometimes people change it, choosing another country for permanent residence. Feel free to go through our citizenship essay samples below. Hopefully provided essay samples will give you some ideas to include in your essay!

Immigration Policies and the DREAM Act Immigration policies have been used to define the social and political stability of many countries. In the US, several immigrants are undocumented. Over 1.3 % of the US population are illegal immigrants (Pang et al., 185).The DREAM Act policy introduced in 2001 to cover those...

Words: 2438

The Natural Born Citizen Clause Natural Born Citizen Clause is a clause contained in the United States’ constitution requiring anybody aspiring to hold the office president and vice president to fulfill. This clause was intended to protect America from foreign influence (Maskell 2). This clause has been contentious since the USA...

Words: 1335

Article II of the U.S constitution states that no individual other than a natural born citizen is eligible to take up the office of the president. The election of 2009 becomes the first presidential election in the history of America where questions regarding the citizenship were raised for both major...

Words: 1251

Complexities of Citizenship in America: A Formal Standing or a Lived Experience? The United States of America is comprised of a population of citizens of different skin color, origins, and cultures. The mix is owed to the history of the country tracing back to the New World period, the slave trade,...

Words: 1458

The Changes in Population The changes in population in the state of Texas are demonstrable by a consideration of documented demographics from census and population estimations provided by the US census bureau. Population Estimates of 2016 The population estimates of 2016 show that the majority of residents in Texas are whites, numbering about...

In this paper, Leti Vollp seeks to answer the question of identity and citizenship of the Middle-Eastern people. She states that the September 11 attack on the United States brought about the creation of a new stereotype against the people who appear Middle-Eastern, Muslim, or Arab as terrorists and their status...

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The Changing Institution of Marriage The institution of marriage has gradually changed in today's culture. A marital partnership has preserved the nuclear family. Marriage always had a specific purpose, whether it was for establishing a person's legal, societal, or financial stability, legalizing their relationship or procreation, expressing their love in public,...

Words: 1612

I concur that the Executive Order 13769 was issued with the purpose of providing American citizens with jobs. However, as you noted, it appears to disregard the plight of immigrants and refugees who might have been compelled to flee their home countries. More precisely, it appears to support racial profiling,...

The problems of racial inclusion, exclusion, and segregation are not new to American culture. Racial and ethnic identities were separate and determined naturalization, according to the first constitution, which the people ratified in 1790. Whiteness was a requirement for citizenship in the US; other races, such as the slaves, who...

Words: 1541

One of the most urgent problems in the modern social, economic, and political landscape is the situation of undocumented immigrants. Many Americans have been thinking about the rhetoric regarding the influx of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Final screening and the construction of a border wall may reduce the...

Words: 2945

The exercise of one's civil rights is a crucial factor in determining how nationalist a citizen will be in the process of creating the federal government. The criminal justice system has made an effort to start a procedure that will allow it to reduce the likelihood of convicts returning to...

Words: 2379

The term power has sparked much debate and discussion as a concept that governs daily life in a variety of ways. Various politicians, philosophers, and academics have attempted to debate and develop the definition of the phrase over the years. Regardless matter how power is defined, the common thread is...

Words: 2416

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Good Citizenship and Global Citizenship Essay

Introduction, good citizen needed to make a global citizen, global citizenship needed to make a good citizen, works cited.

The 21st Century has witnessed integration and increased cultural interaction among people on a previously unprecedented scale. This frequent interaction between people from varied countries and cultures has risen mostly as a result of the advances that have been made in transport and communication technologies.

As a result of this interaction, there has been the major integration of economies and cultures in a process known as globalization. As a result of globalization, governments are increasingly being required to link together different levels of their activities: national and global. This has resulted in the building of a global citizenry which sees the world as their “country”.

However, the global citizen continues to be heavily influenced by the traditional notion of citizen, a term that is “wrapped up in rights and obligations and in owing allegiance to a sovereign state” (Lagos 1). This paper shall argue that it is hugely necessary for one to be a good citizen so as to become a global citizen. To reinforce this claim, this paper shall analyze the extent to which it is necessary to be a “good citizen” in order to be a “global citizen”, and vice versa.

The world is full of social injustices mostly perpetrated by the stronger members of the society against the weaker ones. A defining characteristic of a good national citizen in such an environment is his/her concern about the injustices that occur within their boundaries.

This concern normally manifests itself in protests and public demonstrations calling for action by the government in place to counter the perceived injustices. A report by the World Bank demonstrates that the global citizen shows the same concern for the welfare of the globe and is moved to free their fellow men from dehumanizing conditions (1). As such, it takes a good citizen to make the global citizen who will be keen to decry social injustices against other human beings.

Core to the agendas of the good citizen is the preservation of peace in his country. A good citizen will strive to preserve peace especially within the boundaries of his/her country. This is mostly because the citizen recognizes the destruction and loss that war culminates in. For this reason, the good citizen seeks to mobilize against all wars through peaceful demonstrations and advocacy against wars.

The United Nations declares that peace is a precondition of global citizenship. The global citizen views war and strife as being contrary to his/her agenda. A good citizen who is committed to preserving peace is therefore needed to make a global citizen.

One of the attribute that a good citizen in any democratic society should possess is an understanding of public policies in his/her country. An understanding of this policies will result in enlightenment on one’s country position on issues such as energy, free trade, agriculture and the environment to name but a few.

It is only by understanding the public policies adopted by one’s country that a person can act so as to shape certain conditions such as protection of natural habitat. A global citizen is also concerned with the protection of the environment and establishment of free trade. It would therefore take a good citizen who is well versed with public policies to make a global citizen.

A good citizen is concerned about the impact that his individual actions and daily personal choices have on the country. This is an ideal that is also desirable in the global citizen since as a global citizen should make his/her decisions bases on an awareness of the impact that the decisions will have on the planet. A good citizen who is aware and conscious of the impact that his actions have on a larger scale is therefore needed to make a global citizen.

The international community is characterized by a rich diversity of cultures among its people. The global citizen is therefore prepared to operate amicably in this intercultural environment. The global citizen realizes that there should be unity in diversity and nobody has the right to impose their ideology on anybody or any group of persons.

An ideal citizen should also demonstrate this values and pay respect to people from different cultures and strives to live harmoniously with them. The good citizen should recognize that differences may exist within members of the country and this should not be a cause of strive. By acting as a global citizen who operates in a multicultural sphere, a person can be a good citizen and exist harmoniously with other citizens of varied backgrounds.

Lagos documents that while globalization is acclaimed for having opened up the world and led to the emergence of a “global village”, the same force has paradoxically resulted in localization and local communities have taken greater and greater importance (9). In such an environment, it is the global citizen who holds the separate entities together and seeks to iron out the differences that the various local communities seek to advance.

For a citizen to pass for a good citizen in such an environment (the environment where local communities have taken great importance), he must have the global perspective of the global citizen. It is only by taking the global perspective that a citizen can give fair consideration to ideas with which they disagree.

Global citizenship is increasingly working towards making the planet sustainable for all people. The efforts directed to this end are mostly in the form of advocacy for conservation of the environment, reduction of pollution and the reliance on renewable sources of power. A good citizen is supposed to work towards the preservation of the country’s resources for future resources. As such, the good citizen has to be a global citizen who is concerned with making the planet sustainable.

As a global citizen, one is expected to be non judgmental and overlook the religious differences that divide humanity. The UN states that the global citizen should have values such as “rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”. A good citizen should also have these values enshrined in them. A good citizen should avoid engaging in religious discrimination since this threatens unity among the citizens of the nation.

This paper has demonstrated that being a global citizen is intrinsically connected to being a good citizen. As such, being a global citizenship implies a responsibility to be a good citizen. However, there are instances where being a global citizen may cause one to be a “bad citizen”.

For example, a global citizen is not expected to advocate for war or side with any party during war. Good citizenship calls for one to back their country when it is involved in a war. Acting as a global citizen in such instances can therefore prevent one from being an ideal citizen.

Lagos indicates that a citizen obtains a certain amount of protection from his/her country in return for abiding to some restrictions that the government may impose on him/her (3). A good citizen is therefore required to abide by some laws and allow some bureaucratic control from his/her nation.

A global citizen on the other hand does not have any kind of protection and has some amount of degree from bureaucratic control. Lagos states that the hallmark of global citizen is the lack of allegiance to any body of laws to control the individual. In this light, being a global citizen goes contrary to what being a good citizen entails.

This paper set out to argue that to a large extent, it is necessary to be a “good citizen” in order to be a “global citizen” and vice versa. The paper performed a detailed analysis of how a person may be obligated to be a good citizen so as to qualify as a global citizen and vise versa.

This paper has shown that global citizens borrow most of their rights and obligations from the traditional “citizen” who is defined by a civic engagement to a nation existing in a particular geography. In particular, the paper demonstrates that values such as tolerance, civic education are innate in both the good citizen and the global citizen. However, the paper has also shown that global citizen differs significantly from the citizen and in some instances, being a global citizen may cause one not to fulfill his role as a good citizen.

Lagos, Taso. Global Citizenship- Towards a Definition . 2002. Web.

The World Bank. “Global Citizenship- Ethical Challenges Ahead”. Conference on Leadership and Core Values . 2002. Web.

UN. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2010. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2019, February 20). Good Citizenship and Global Citizenship. https://ivypanda.com/essays/good-citizenship-and-global-citizenship/

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Essay on Global Citizenship

Students are often asked to write an essay on Global Citizenship in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Global Citizenship

What is global citizenship.

Global citizenship means seeing yourself as a part of the whole world, not just your country. It’s about caring for people and the planet, no matter where they are. Global citizens work together to solve big problems like poverty and climate change.

Responsibilities of Global Citizens

Being a global citizen means you have duties. You should learn about different cultures, respect the environment, and help others. It’s about making good choices that don’t hurt others around the world.

Benefits of Global Citizenship

When we act as global citizens, we make the world better. We get to understand different people and can work on making peace. It also helps us to solve big problems that affect everyone, like keeping the earth clean and safe.

250 Words Essay on Global Citizenship

Global citizenship is the idea that everyone on our planet is part of a big community. It’s like thinking of the whole world as one big neighborhood. People who believe in global citizenship care about issues that affect everyone, no matter where they live.

Caring for the Earth

One part of being a global citizen is looking after our planet. This means doing things to protect the environment, like recycling or turning off lights to save energy. It’s about keeping the Earth clean and safe for all of us and the animals too.

Helping Each Other

Global citizens also think it’s important to help people in need. This could be by giving money to charities that work all over the world or by learning about different cultures and understanding people who are different from us.

Another big idea in global citizenship is fairness. This means making sure that people everywhere have what they need, like food, water, and a chance to go to school. It’s not fair if some people have too much while others have too little.

Working Together

Finally, global citizenship is about countries and people working together to solve big problems. This can be anything from fighting diseases that spread across countries to making sure everyone has a good place to live.

In short, being a global citizen means caring for our world and the people in it. It’s about learning, sharing, and working together to make the world a better place for everyone.

500 Words Essay on Global Citizenship

Imagine a big school that has students from every part of the world. These students learn together, play together, and help each other. This is a bit like what global citizenship is. Global citizenship means thinking of yourself as a part of one big world community. Instead of just looking after the people in your own town or country, you care about everyone on Earth.

Why is Global Citizenship Important?

Our world is connected in many ways. What happens in one country can affect many others. For example, if the air gets polluted in one place, it can travel to other places and make the air dirty there too. By being global citizens, we can work together to solve big problems like pollution, poverty, and sickness that can touch people everywhere.

Respecting Cultures and People

Global citizens respect and learn about different cultures and people. Every culture has its own special stories, food, and ways of living. When you are a global citizen, you are curious about these differences and you understand that every person is important, no matter where they come from.

Taking Care of the Planet

Our Earth is the only home we have. Global citizens take care of it by doing things like recycling, saving water, and planting trees. We all share the same air, water, and land, so it’s everyone’s job to look after them.

Helping Others

Global citizens try to help people who need it. This can be by giving money to charities that work all over the world or by being kind to someone from another country who moves to your town. When we help each other, the whole world becomes a better place.

Learning and Sharing Knowledge

Being a global citizen also means learning about the world and sharing what you know. You can read books, watch films, or talk to people from different places. Then, you can share what you learn with your friends and family.

Being Active in Your Community

Even though global citizenship is about the whole world, it starts in your own community. You can join groups that clean up parks, help people who are sick, or raise money for good causes. By doing small things where you live, you are being a part of something much bigger.

Global citizenship is like being a friend to the entire world. It means learning, sharing, and caring for others and our planet. Even if you are just one person, you can make a big difference. When we all work together as global citizens, we make the world a happier, healthier, and more peaceful place.

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Article contents

Global citizenship.

• April R. Biccum April R. Biccum School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.556
• Published online: 19 November 2020

The concept of “Global Citizenship” is enjoying increased currency in the public and academic domains. Conventionally associated with cosmopolitan political theory, it has moved into the public domain, marshaled by elite actors, international institutions, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, and ordinary people. At the same time, scholarship on Global Citizenship has increased in volume in several domains (International Law, Political Theory, Citizenship Studies, Education, and Global Business), with the most substantial growth areas in Education and Political Science, specifically in International Relations and Political Theory. The public use of the concept is significant in light of what many scholars regard as a breakdown and reconfiguration of national citizenship in both theory and practice. The rise in its use is indicative of a more general change in the discourse on citizenship. It has become commonplace to offer globalization as a cause for these changes, citing increases in regular and irregular migration, economic and political dispossession owing to insertion in the global economy, the ceding of sovereignty to global governance, the pressure on policy caused by financial flows, and cross-border information-sharing and political mobilization made possible by information communications technologies (ICTs), insecurities caused by environmental degradation, political fragmentation, and inequality as key drivers of change. Global Citizenship is thus one among a string of adjectives attempting to characterize and conceptualize a transformative connection between globalization, political subjectivity, and affiliation. It is endorsed by elite global actors and the subject of an educational reform movement. Some scholarship observes empirical evidence of Global Citizenship, understood as active, socially and globally responsible political participation which contributes to global democracy, within global institutions, elites, and the marginalized themselves. Arguments for or against a cosmopolitan sensibility in political theory have been superseded by both the technological capability to make global personal legal recognition a possibility, and by the widespread endorsement of Global Citizenship among the Global Education Policy regime. In educational scholarship Global Citizenship is regarded as a form of contemporary political being that needs to be socially engineered to facilitate the spread of global democracy or the emergence of new political arrangements. Its increasing currency among a diverse range of actors has prompted a variety of attempts either to codify or to study the variety of usages in situ. As such the use of Global Citizenship speaks to a central methodological problem in the social sciences: how to fix key conceptual variables when the same concepts are a key aspect of the behavior of the actors being studied? As a concept, Global Citizenship is also intimately associated with other concepts and theoretical traditions, and is among the variety of terms used in recent years to try to reconceptualize changes it the international system. Theoretically it has complex connections to cosmopolitanism, liberalism, and republicanism; empirically it is the object of descriptive and normative scholarship. In the latter domain, two central cleavages repeat: the first is between those who see Global Citizenship as the redress for global injustices and the extension of global democracy, and those who see it as irredeemably capitalist and imperial; the second is between those who see evidence for Global Citizenship in the actions and behavior of a wide range of actors, and those who seek to socially engineer Global Citizenship through educational reform.

• globalization
• global governance
• cosmopolitanism
• citizenship
• global civil society

What is Global Citizenship?

Global Citizenship (hereafter GC) as a concept is enjoying some currency in the public and academic domains. The theory and study of GC has been a growth industry especially in philosophy, international relations, and education, and it has been adopted as a central educational reform under the Sustainable Development Goals and endorsed by major international organizations, think tanks, and the expanded regime of Global Education Policy (Mundy, 2016 ). What is meant by GC varies between political actors and academics. The academic literature on GC divides into two branches. The normative theoretical branch has a number of overlaps and engagements with cosmopolitan, liberal, and republican political theory. The empirical scholarship, meanwhile, observes GC’s existence in individual behavior and the structures of transnational organization; in the case of education, empirical scholarship offers ways and means of producing GC through a reform of pedagogy, curriculum, and educational design. It is commonplace to begin any discussion of GC with an account of cosmopolitan political theory dating back to the ancients. The problem with this account is that these theoretical arguments for and against GC have been superseded both by its increasingly widespread use among political actors and by the technological capability to make it something of an institutional reality. GC is no longer simply a theoretical or philosophical discussion but is increasingly also a diversified field of empirical study. The problem with the study of GC empirically is that it is one of those conceptual variables that cuts across scholarship and public use. It is a concept, according to Reinhart Koselleck’s understanding of that term, in that it is an inherently contestable carrier of signification with multiple meanings (Koselleck, 2002 ).

What is true of GC is equally true of citizenship. Both are used by political actors and institutions, and also by academics, to inform empirical study; they are equally both concepts that inform normative political theory about the ordering foundations of society. They thus straddle the distance near (ordinary usage), distance far (academic and technocratic usage), and the normative theoretical of both political actors and academics (other conceptual variables with a similar bifurcation are democracy and the state) (Ferguson & Mansbach, 2010 ; Mitchell, 1991 ). This entanglement speaks to methodological problems at the heart of all social science endeavor: the use of the same concepts by political actors, institutions, and academics; and the problem of trying to fix those concepts for the purposes of advancing knowledge, or equally, trying to elaborate them philosophically for the purposes of creating social change. In the case of both citizenship and GC, the attempt to use various methodological techniques to fix their meaning and tie them to concrete empirical phenomena (Sartori, 1984 ) is unproductive because all these concepts are quintessential examples of the fact that political actors are themselves also self-conscious conceptualizers. Moreover, the way GC is conceptualized by certain political actors is currently having concrete political outcomes (Biccum, 2018b , 2020 ). Trying to improve its study by using Sartori’s ladder of abstraction to parse it into conceptual precision will not do when conceptualization is itself an integral part of its political impact and institutionalization. Moreover, there is increasing overlap between academic scholarship and the concept’s political operationalization, particularly in education.

Interpretive social science offers a way of grappling with this complexity by recognizing what a concept is (i.e., the function in language that allows for multiplicity of meaning and abstraction) (Koselleck, 2002 ), the ubiquity of the use of concepts for all language users (Geertz, 1973 ), and methodological techniques that are consistent with the properties of language and its study in use (Fairclough, 1989 ; Schaffer, 2016 ). The interpretivist approach is more appropriate for fleshing out the complexity of defining GC by recognizing that the rise in its use both academically and politically is in response to changing circumstances, but also and concurrently that its take up is an attempt to by actors to change political circumstances. The interpretivist approach equips scholars with a sensitivity for assessing how and why GC’s use is significant. GC is one among a variety of adjectival variations on citizenship, but it is one that has taken greater hold than any of its rivals and, depending on who uses it and how, has implications for a shift in identity and allegiance from the national to the global. Therefore, its increased use by elites and operationalization in policy to affect change should be recognized as politically significant. Interpretive social science provides the analytical and methodological tools to ground, locate, and elucidate the various meanings of GC in theory and in practice (Schaffer, 2016 ).

Citizenship, as a concept, is also both a variably applied political institution and a contested theoretical concept. It emerged as a body of study in its own right in the 20th century only to be problematized toward the end of the century with a variety of qualifying adjectives, including postnational citizenship (Rose, 1996 ), the denationalization of citizenship (Soysal, 1994 ), extrastatal citizenship (Lee, 2014 ), cultural citizenship (Richardson, 1998 ), minority citizenship (Yuval-Davis, 1997 ), ecological citizenship (van Steenbergen, 1994 ), cosmopolitan citizenship (Held, 1995 ), consumer citizenship (Stevenson, 1997 ), and mobility citizenship (Urry, 1990 ). The meaning and theorization of citizenship itself in the context of globalization have undergone some considerable contestation. In the late 1990s, sociologist John Urry noted the contradiction that just as everyone is seeking to be a citizen of an existing national society, globalization is changing what it means to be a citizen (Urry, 1999 ). For some theorists of citizenship, it has normative dimensions. Brian Turner in particular made a distinction between a conservative view of citizenship as passive and private, and a more revolutionary idea of citizenship as active and public (Bowden, 2003 ; Turner, 1990 ). For theorists of citizenship it is a mode of political membership that has as a performative nature, even by those who are not officially recognized. Understood this way, it is a quintessentially democratic political subjectivity, where agency is expressed in struggles for rights and inclusion for the benefit of self and others.

Historicized as an actually existing political institution, citizenship can be shown to be a mechanism of differentiation through rights allocation, inclusion, and exclusion that is unavoidably connected to state and imperial violence, interest, and power. For critical scholars, it is gendered, racialized, and colonial and has been a mechanism not for the expansion of civil, political, and social rights (as canonized in Marshall’s 1949 account) but as a means of conferring those rights on the few (Isin & Nyers, 2014b ; Marshall, 1949 ). Editors of the Routledge Handbook of GC Studies survey the various ways in which national citizenship has been conceptualized and how Citizenship Studies must be revised in light of globalization (Isin & Nyers, 2014b ; Lee, 2014 ). A work in “critical Citizenship Studies,” this volume notes that citizenship has been defined as membership, status, practice, or performance, with each definition harboring presumptions about politics and agency. To overcome these shortcomings, the editors offer a minimal definition which contains conceptual complexity. For Isin and Nyers, citizenship is “an institution, mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the polity” (Isin & Nyers, 2014a , p. 1). The word “polity” enables a conceptualization of diverse political entities and overlapping governance configurations. “Rights mediation” recognizes that citizenship is inclusive and exclusive simultaneously and that it is most often expanded through political struggle. Finally, the “Subject” is a way of understanding political behavior on the part of people with no formal institutional recognition. The volume aims to address the fact that Citizenship Studies is globalizing because people around the world are articulating their struggles through the political institution of citizenship, and they see this struggle as the performative dimension or enactment of citizenship in political behavior that makes claims upon states and governing institutions. This is why scholars are engaged in “a competition to invent new names to describe the political subjects that are enacting political agency today. Whether it is the Activist or the Actant, the Militant or the Multitude” (Isin & Nyers, 2014a , p. 5). Contributors to this volume are highly skeptical of the concept of GC, but this is precisely the kind of active enactment of rights and responsibilities that scholars of GC see as evidence of its existence, or endorsement for its contribution to the globalization of democracy. Thus, the emergence of GC is part and parcel of the very contestation over citizenship that contributors to this volume see as evidence for grassroots political agency and democratic political change.

As a concept, GC is often linked with the body of cosmopolitan political thought dating back to antiquity (Heater, 1996 ), but this association needs to be qualified. Its increased usage in the early 21st century among scholars, philosophers, policymakers, global institutions, and educators has been prolific, leading to several attempts in the literature to codify its various meanings (Fanghanel & Cousin, 2012 ; Hicks, 2003 ; Sant, Davies, Pashby, & Shultz, 2018 ), or to study its variation in use empirically (Gaudelli, 2009 ). Some have argued that its conceptual heterogeneity is strategically advantageous for those who are using it in practice, and political actors particularly in education have devoted a substantial amount of time to conceptualizing it for the purposes of its articulation in policy (Biccum, 2018b ; Hartmeyer, 2015 ). In the education space, an agreed-upon meaning organized around attitudes, aptitudes, and behavior is now being utilized by international organizations (specifically the United Nations, United Nations Education Science and Culture Organisation, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), which are disseminating their preferred definitions through the expanded global education community via declarations, policy advice, research, information portals, and international conferences. Attempts to codify the different meanings of GC in the academic scholarship have used different metatheoretical concepts to understand the systematic organization of meaning, among them heuristics (Gaudelli, 2009 ), discourse (Karlberg, 2008 ; Parmenter, 2011 ; Schattle, 2015 ; Shukla, 2009 ), ideology (Pais & Costa, 2017 ; Schattle, 2008 ), and typology (Andreotti, 2014 ; Oxley & Morris, 2013 ). For all this definitional and metatheoretical categorization, what cuts across all are the notions that a global citizen is a type of person (endowed with a certain kind of knowledge, values, attitudes, and aptitudes) and that GC is expressed in behavior (always active). Oxley and Morris’s ( 2013 ) codification is often cited in educational scholarship that is working to provide the pedagogical and theoretical foundations for producing Global Citizens (Bosio & Torres, 2019 ) or critically contesting existing practices and theoretical models of GC education in order to make them live up to what both scholarly factions regard as its emancipatory potential (Andreotti, 2014 ).

The various attempts to codify the use of GC in situ tend to make a distinction between hegemonic use and attempts by both scholars and political actors to expand its meaning for political purposes. In this context Oxley and Morris ( 2013 ) make a distinction between “cosmopolitan based” GC Education, which is further nuanced by political, moral, economic, and cultural considerations; and “advocacy based,” which is inflected by social, critical, environmental, and spiritual features. This distinction effectively codifies the differences between official uses of GC by elite actors, and the contestations from critical practitioners and scholars who seek to expand its official meaning (a) to include the grassroots activity of activists; and (b) in educational policy and practice, to include knowledge of global capital and European colonial history, a normative attitude against the inequalities and injustices these have produced, and the aptitude to hold elite actors to account (Andreotti & Souza, 2011 ). Gaudelli ( 2009 ) and Schattle ( 2008 ) based their discursive and ideological codifications on methodologically informed definitions of discourse and ideology and an empirical focus on the use of the concept in multiple sites. Gaudelli identifies five different discursive framings (neoliberal, nationalist, Marxist, world justice and governance, and cosmopolitan), and Schattle ( 2008 ) deploys an ideological analysis to determine whether the discourse of GC in education constitutes a new “globalist” ideology. He finds that in fact it remains inflected by varieties of liberal ideology, even its critical variants, because of its emphasis on human rights, equality, and social justice.

Despite contestations over meaning and use, there are those in the literature who regard GC as the conceptual iteration that underpins a hegemonic ordering of a global governance to further globalize the market by creating market-ready “neoliberal subjectivities” (Chapman, Ruiz-Chapman, & Eglin, 2018 ), or who argue that the proselytizing gesture of its proponents and its rootedness in Western liberal democratic culture make it inescapably imperial (Andreotti & Souza, 2011 ). A common accusation is that GC is an attempt to put a progressive veneer on the global market. In addition, definitions of GC that link it to worldly cosmopolitan values, high-tech skills, and enough cross-cultural knowledge to enable flexibility and adaptability map neatly onto the kinds of subjectivities one will find among the world’s most privileged and highly mobile workers. For critics, there is evidence for this critique in the individualizing and entrepreneurial programs which make elites responsible for limited social change that won’t disrupt market relations. Conversely, the neorepublican and neoliberal response to this critique is that citizenship is inseparable from market-based participation in society because it is the market’s tendency to untether people from social, political, and economic constraints and to diversify the economy that creates free rational agents capable of participating democratically (Lovett & Pettit, 2009 ). From this perspective, chauvinism, discrimination, and communitarianism are bad for global markets, ergo the promotion of the progressive social values of GC is good for the global economy. The critics of GC are quite right in that it is being articulated and reframed to fit the particular ideological commitments of promarket actors in certain sites (Chapman et al., 2018 ; Pais & Costa, 2017 ). However, paying close empirical attention to how conceptualization works, what should be emphasized is that GC’s heterogeneity, fluidity, and contested meaning ensure that it cannot be dismissed as essentially one thing and serving a single purpose (Biccum, 2020 ). Instead, close empirical attention needs to be paid to who is using it, how, and for what purpose.

The Theory of GC

It is commonplace to want to tell the story of GC as the next step in the genealogy of the cosmopolitan tradition. But the picture is more complex than that, because while both cosmopolitanism and GC have close family ties with liberal political theory, it is a mistake to collapse them because there are articulations of liberalism which reject cosmopolitanism, such as the work of John Rawls. Equally, in GC’s associations with antiquity there are concrete connections also with republican political thought (Pagden, 2000 ). In fact, republicanism has equally enjoyed a revival since the 1990s (Costa, 2009 ; Dagger, 2006 ; Lovett & Pettit, 2009 ) and, when examined in detail, the approach to the market found in elite articulations of GC do bear a closer affinity with neorepublicanism than, as critics maintain, neoliberalism (Biccum, 2020 ). The work of Luis Cabrera argues for maintaining a distinction between cosmopolitanism and GC while understanding their connections (Cabrera, 2008 ). Succinct political theories of GC have emerged (Carter, 2001 ; Dower, 2000 ; Tully, 2014 ), some of which try to counter this tradition and some of which marshal GC as a suitable replacement for aggressive American militarism (Arneil, 2007 ; Hunter, 1992 ), arguing that it will allow the United States to pass an “Augustan Threshold.” However articulated theoretically, GC is intimately tied up with questions of human nature, political subjectivity, and appropriate political arrangements, such as polis, state, republic, global governance, world state or empire, with a characteristic omission of political arrangements deemed less formal or “modern.”

The commonplace narrative that places GC within the history of the repetitive revival of cosmopolitan thought is best expressed by April Carter ( 2001 ) and Derek Heater ( 1996 ), whose histories observe a cycle of periodic revival in which the structural contradictions of imperial formations follow a pattern of critique and externalization. Heater begins with Aristotle’s view of the polis as a form of political organization that is congruent with the nature of man. 1 This is an intellectual gesture that naturalizes the polis, making it an expression of the final and perfect condition of human development, and provides legitimacy for its transplantation elsewhere (similar to Hegel’s view of the state). These ideas were put under sustained pressure from circumstances that bear a remarkable similarity to patterns coded by contemporary scholars as “globalization,” including territorial expansion, extensions of governance, migration, and the privatization of the military. Cosmopolitan ideas, Heater argues, arise out of the failure of the polis to live up to claims that it is the expression of human nature. This led to the exploration of two other ideas: the true nature of human beings should be sought either in solitary individualism, or in the essential oneness of the human race. These were first articulated by figures who were critical of existing political arrangements such as Diogenes, Cicero, and Zeno. According to Heater, the periodic revival of cosmopolitan ideas since ancient times is caused by a sense of external threat, whether it be war or environmental catastrophe. Each articulation differs in emphasis over the role of the state, the role of the individual, the role of global institutions, and the desirability of a world state. Similarly, historian Anthony Pagden offers a genealogy of cosmopolitan thought which sees it as indelibly rooted in imperial structures but finds its culmination in the global republicanism of Immanuel Kant, in which Pagden finds there are also critiques of imperialism (Pagden, 2000 ). Thus, an analytical distinction must be maintained between concrete political projects for the realization of global democracy or a world state, and cosmopolitan political philosophy, although they certainly intersect. So, for example, the early cosmopolitans did not devise plans for constitutions and governance, and early- 20th-century advocates for a world state (such as H. G. Wells) were not philosophers (Heater, 1996 ). The International Relations (IR) scholarship which sees the eventuation of a world state deriving from structural conditions is not necessarily engaging normatively with the concept of GC (Ruggie, 2002 ; Wendt, 2003 ), and some scholarship on GC sees its democratic potential in the fact that it is a set of citizen claims, attitudes, and behaviors in the absence of a world state (Dower, 2000 ; Dower & Williams, 2002 ; Falk, 2002 ).

Understanding GC as the culmination in the genealogy of cosmopolitan thought also conflicts with the cosmopolitan revival in IR, although these scholars repeat the formulation described by Heater: namely, the contradictions of globalization demonstrate the flaws in the Hegelian understanding that the nation state is the perfect reflection of human rationality and the only political arrangement that will enable the full flowering of human development. The turn to cosmopolitanism in IR is also occasioned by the end of the Cold War and the disillusionment with Marx in the context of a recognition of diverse identities and non-class-based modes of social, political, and economic exclusion and the new social movements that sprang up as a redress. The cosmopolitan vision for the extension of democracy through reformed institutions is articulated by Richard Linklater ( 1998 ), Daniele Archibugi ( 1993 ), and David Held ( 1995 ) as a redress for these structural conditions. The sovereign state cannot continue to claim to be the only relevant moral community when the opportunities and incidences of transnational harm rise alongside increasing interdependence (Doyle, 2007 ). Similar to their ancient counterparts, Linklater, Archibugi, and Held offer cosmopolitan democracy as both a critique of the Hegelian theory of the state as the highest expression human rationality and a method of expanding democracy transnationally. Both Archibugi and Linklater offer the possibility of direct citizen participation in global institutions as the mechanism that would make for a robust global democracy. Global or world citizenship is implicated in this project, but these scholars do not offer a political theory of GC as such.

The cosmopolitan revival in political theory does, however, theorize GC as a way of reconfiguring ethical foundations of the individual connection to state and world (Appiah, 2007 ; Nussbaum, 1996 ; Parekh, 2003 ). The cosmopolitanism of these scholars is organized around the premise that, in the context of “complex interdependence,” individuals in advanced economies have ethical obligations to the rest of the human race which can override their obligations to fellow citizens. Contained within many arguments in favor of GC is a latent criticism of the nation state and transnational capital. For Thomas Pogge ( 1992 ) this amounts to recognition of the insertion of the citizens of advanced economies into global value and production chains; for Bhiku Parekh this amounts to recognition of the political and economic debt gained through European colonization, and he calls for a globally oriented national citizenship (Parekh, 2003 ). 2

The central cleavage is the relevance and role of the state. Critics of GC argue that GC’s rootless sense of obligation from nowhere undermines Aristotelian notions of civic virtue, and that the nation state is the only community where active citizenship can be practiced (Carter, 2001 ; Miller, 1999 ; Walzer, 1994 ). Others offer GC as a way of being that does not devalue, erode, or supersede the nation state. Nigel Dower, for example, argued in 2000 that a world state is not needed for GC (Dower, 2000 ). Here he is responding to critics who argued at the time that GC cannot exist, because of a lack of common identity and institutions. Some scholars offer “rooted cosmopolitanism” as an affinity to the global that is grounded in individual biography and location (Kymlicka & Walker, 2012 ). Similarly, Martha Nussbaum sparked a debate among prominent political, social, legal, and literary theorists over the competing merits of national versus cosmopolitan affinity, and offered concentric circles of affinity from the individual to the global because the state as nothing more than a “morally arbitrary boundary” (Nussbaum, 1996 , p. 14). Nussbaum later revised this position to articulate a “globally sensitive patriotism,” arguing that the sentiments that underpin patriotism can be used to rescue the concept from its chauvinistic variants, allowing it then to play a role in creating a “decent world culture” (Nussbaum, 2008 , p. 81). But for most of these scholars the state is the starting point for either advocacy or critique of GC.

There are other scholars in the analytic tradition attaching to GC a notion of cosmopolitan right, meaning the restriction of individual freedom so that it harmonizes with the freedom of everyone else. For Luis Cabrera ( 2008 ) this is an important step toward developing an overarching conception of cosmopolitanism, one that details appropriate courses of action and reform in relation to individuals and institutions in the current global system. The collapsing of GC and cosmopolitanism as synonymous is for Cabrera a mistake. There are clear differences between them, as well as different conceptual inflections within them. Within cosmopolitanism, Cabrera details the institutional cosmopolitanism of Archibugi and Linklater, which is concerned with the creation of a comprehensive network of global governing institutions to achieve just global distributive outcomes; and moral cosmopolitanism, which as we see in Appiah, Pogge, and Parekh is concerned not with institution-building but with assessing the justice of institutions according to how individuals fare in relation to them. Cabrera’s claim is that individual cosmopolitanism should be understood as GC. GC for Cabrera is a moral orientation toward and a claim to membership of the whole of the human community and a theory of citizenship that is fundamentally concerned with appropriate individual action. In other words, Cabrera is offering a theoretical framework for the operationalization of GC which offers guidelines of “right action” for the global human community. “Right action” can be objectively known for Cabrera following the analytical tradition and particularly the liberal thought of John Rawls. On the question of the world state Cabrera equivocates. He argues that GC is the ethical orientation guiding individual action in a global human community and not preparation for a world state, but he nevertheless advocates for a world state because of the biases against cosmopolitan distributive justice inherent in the sovereign state system. For Cabrera GC identifies the very specific duties incumbent on all humankind to promote the creation of an actual global political community up to and including the creation of a world state.

The question of empire is conspicuously absent among these scholars, while other scholars fully implicate Western imperial history in their account of GC. James Tully ( 2014 ) is the only political theorist of GC to pay close attention the role of European empire in constructing, globalizing, and making modular civil citizenship. With a focus on language and meaning as the sites of political contestation, Tully sees GC as articulating a locus of struggle, noting that because of empire, most of the enduring struggles in the history of politics have taken place in and over the language of citizenship and the activities and institutions into which it is woven. GC for Tully is neither fixed nor determinable, as it is for Cabrera; it contains no calculus or universal rule for its application in particular cases. Rather it is a conjunction of “global” and “citizenship” that can be regarded as the linguistic artifact of the innovative tendency of citizens and noncitizens to contest and create something new in the practice of citizenship. Basing his account of “public philosophy” on a philosophy of language drawn from Wittgenstein, Skinner, and Foucault, in which language is constitutive of human social and political relations, Tully regards freedom and democracy as practiced through language. Language is inseparable from cognition, and in practices of meaning-making human beings continually (re)negotiate their circumstances, and in so doing have the capacity to change the language, and in changing the language, change the game. Tully offers a political theory of GC that builds on the open-endedness indicated by Linklater and Falk, and sees in the multitudinous expressions of transnational political activism the possibility of different, more democratic political arrangements. This is consistent with decolonial scholarship in IR, postcolonial scholarship in education, and critical scholarship on sustainability, which argue that the modernistic, dualist language of science is part of the problem in that it hinders the ability of scholars and citizens to conceptualize life differently. To change social reality, they argue, we have to change our language (Shallcross & Robinson, 2006 ), and for many critical scholars GC is part of this conceptual shift.

The Study of GC

Research on the practice of GC can be roughly divided between the normative theoretical and the phenomenological empirical and contains a tension between GC as actually existing and needing to be produced. Scholarship has expanded substantially since the 1990s and moved away from an association with cosmopolitanism toward a direct engagement with GC as a concept and field of study in its own right. Contributions to the field have appeared in Media and Cultural Studies (Khatib, 2003 ; Nash, 2009 ), International Law (Hunter, 1992 ; Torre, 2005 ), Psychology (Reysen & Hackett, 2017 ; Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013 ), and Citizenship Studies (Arneil, 2007 ; Bowden, 2003 ; Soguk, 2014 ), but the bulk of the scholarship appears in International Relations (IR) (residing in roughly the subfields of Globalization, Global Governance, Social Movements, and Global Civil Society) and in educational scholarship (residing in pedagogical scholarship but also emerging interdisciplinary fields where educational scholarship is overlapping with International Political Economy, IR, and International Political Sociology) (Armstrong, 2006 ; Ball, 2012 ; Dale, 2000 ; Desforges, 2004 ). Methodologically, most of the scholarship has been qualitative and interpretive or critical, with a handful of quantitative approaches just emerging in Psychology seeking to measure global citizen attributes, and one study providing a quantitative aggregate account of the appearance of “GC” in textbooks (Buckner & Russell, 2013 ; Katzarska-Miller & Reysen, 2018 ; Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013 ). Debates across much of the scholarship follow an optimistic–pessimistic or normative–critical dichotomy.

Sociological scholarship on globalization going back to the 1990s describes a growing global awareness that can be causally attributed to information communications technologies (ICTs). ICTs play a central role in all accounts of “observable” GC, even if operating in the background as the necessary sufficient conditions for transnational cooperation and mobilization. This sociological approach sees in the massification of communications technology a distribution of symbolic resources that inform how people see themselves and their knowledge of others in time and space. This is in keeping with 20th-century scholarship in the fields of nationalism, communication, and the histories of knowledge which have posited the constitutive nature of communications technology and identity (Anderson, 1983 ; Foucault, 1982 , 2000 ; Lule, 2015 ; Martin, Manns, & Bowe, 2004 ; Norris, 2009 ). For Urry, Pippa Norris, and others, just as national broadcasting can be causally credited with the development of national citizenship, so can ICTs be credited with the rise in global affinities, cosmopolitan worldviews, and self-identification as a global citizen. In addition to transforming the possibilities for transnational interaction, mobilization, and governance and the market across terrestrial space, ICTs enable visibility, the spread of knowledge and shared experiences, the perception of threat, and a sense of the world as a whole. For this approach there is a historical connection between ICTs and democracy dating back to the social upheaval in Europe that went with the introduction of the printing press. When ICTs are global, they enable more political transparency through the identification and exposing of wrongdoing. Harmful backstage behavior can be revealed, put on display, and represented over and over again. This has been done to states and corporations over their environmental and human-rights transgressions and has fuelled the activities of new social movements. Such revelations contribute to the knowledge base of those claiming to be global citizens, and of those being so characterized in the scholarship.

Communications technology is one of the structural factors making it possible to uncouple citizenship from the territorial state. Advances in ICTs have also created the technical capacity to make GC an institutional reality. The volume Debating Transformations of National Citizenship devotes a section to debating the possibilities inherent in blockchain technology to confer a grant of citizenship to all humanity through a universal digital identity. Blockchain technology provides the technological capability, international law provides the global juridical framework (Article 25(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), according to which every citizen should have the right to participate in the conduct of public affairs), and the Sustainable Development Goals articulate a political will and policy framework (goal 16.9 aims to provide a legal identity for all, including birth registration by 2030 ). For optimists, blockchain technology would provide universal recognition of personhood; enhance individual freedom by allowing people to create self-sovereign identities with control over their personal data; mitigate against the increased politicization of citizenship; and could have the benefit of protecting human rights and stateless persons, assisting in the fight against human trafficking, and even mitigate the tendency of states to monetize naturalization (De Filippi, 2018 ). In addition, it contains the possibility for emancipatory movements to mobilize across territorial borders. The creation of multiple cloud communities would allow for experimentation with democratic utopias and would enable a direct global democracy by creating the possibility of a one-person-one-vote participation in global governance (Orgad, 2018 ). By extending decision-making power to individuals and communities that are currently excluded, it contains the potential for the realization of cosmopolitan democracy as envisaged by Linklater and Archibugi. For pessimists, this would require a globalization of communications technology that is not environmentally sustainable and would centralize power in the hands of states and corporations.

Moving beyond technological determinism, a common refrain in the study of GC is that it is organically expressed, manifested and spread by the globalizing of civil society and transnational advocacy networks (TANs) (Armstrong, 2006 ; Carter, 2001 ; Desforges, 2004 ; Meutzelfeldt & Smith, 2002 ). Here, the attribute of causality is not necessarily with the individual, but with the variety of political arrangements that have emerged to address transnational issues. According to April Carter, “amnesty as an organisation can be seen as a collective global citizen” (Carter, 2001 , p. 83). While not all the groups that fall within the designation Global Civil Society (GCS) can be associated with GC, it is the groups which are engaged in political lobbying, policy work, volunteering, campaigning, fundraising, and protest on social justice issues to do with poverty, inequality, and human rights that are regarded as sites for the study of GC because they are ostensibly motivated by identification with the whole of humanity, cosmopolitan values, a concern about injustice, a willingness to act collaboratively and cooperatively. Moreover, their activities are undergirded by and contribute to the operationalization of a universal system of human rights. They assist local populations in making claims against state governments and they make claims against global institutions for redress of problems. Participants in these networks are transnationally mobile through associations which facilitate the production of knowledge, the formation of “epistemic communities,” and consensus therefore around the policy response to the transnational issues around which they are organized (Haas, 1989 , 1992 ).

A circular logic is at play here. Activists who care about social justice issues comprise the personnel of groups which create networks for the purposes of making change. These networks in turn are new forms of association wherein participation engenders the sorts of values and attributes which can be assigned to the global citizen (Pallas, 2012 ). This logic of learning through participation is a common refrain across political theory, constructivist IR, social movements, and education scholarship (Finnemore, 1993 ). These developments in transnational collective action underpin the claim that changing patterns of global governance create new consequences for citizenship. Much of the scholarship regards this as a democratic trend because many of the groups which inhabit these networks are (semi)autonomous from states and governance structures; use knowledge gathered from grassroots and professional experience to highlight global issues to shape public opinion in such a way as to put pressure on states and corporations responsible for abuses; or push global public policy around health, education, and development in the direction of a more equitable distribution and access and inclusion. Even when the policy preferences of TANs make it onto the global agenda (such as happened with educational access and inclusion and GC education via the Sustainable Development Goals), these groups can continue to apply pressure by also monitoring the operation of UN agencies or national compliance with particular international agreements: the Global Education Monitoring Reports and a special issue of Global Policy (volume 10, supplement 1, September 2019 ) are good examples of this. TANs are regarded as strengthening international society and linkages between states (mitigating the structural condition of anarchy initially posed by IR). For scholars, these spaces of activity embody GC by promoting a world order based not on state interests but on human rights, and acting as a vehicle for strengthening the legitimacy of global institutions and international law (Jelin, 2010 ; Shallcross & Robinson, 2006 ). The interaction they create between the bottom-up and top-down in an expanded architecture of global governance divided by policy specialism is evidence of Alexander Wendt’s claim that a world state is inevitable (Wendt, 2003 ).

However, civil-society groups and TANs are not the only nonstate actors laying claim to the label “global citizen.” Corporations and their representative organizations (e.g., the World Economic Forum) are also adopting the label, and the literature on Global Corporate Citizenship cites the same set of circumstances regarding the pressure that globalization has put upon state capacity. In the circumstance of a “global regulatory deficit” that has been created by financing conditions that required the shrinkage of the state, corporations have a choice between exploiting that deficit for gain, or exhibiting “enlightened self-interest” by recognizing that they have social responsibilities as well as rights. Corporations act as global citizens, according to this literature, by assuming responsibilities of a state, such as the provision of public-health programs, education, and protection of human rights through working conditions while operating in countries with repressive regimes. Global corporate citizens engage in self-regulation to ensure the peace and stability required for continued realization of profits (Henderson, 2000 ; Schwab, 2008 ; Sherer & Palazzo, 2008 ). Considering that much of the activism of social movements against neoliberal globalization has been directed against corporations and the global institutions promoting their preferred policy agendas, this raises a question in need of further exploration. How can the site of the trouble provide ostensibly the solution? Should observers be relieved by the corporate recognition of social justice issues when economic nationalism is on the rise, or should it be regarded as an instrumental attempt at co-opting?

Here lies a central cleavage animating both the endorsement and the critiques of GC. Does capitalism underwrite democracy through economic growth, or does it erode democracy by facilitating monopolies which put power and wealth in the hands of a few? For many commentators, the expanded networks of global governance are not democratic, because they are inhabited by powerful actors with asymmetric bargaining power and the ability to ensure that whatever compromises are made do not trouble the logic of the existing system (El Bouhali, 2015 ; Caballero, 2019 ). The spaces inhabited by global citizens are not in fact spaces of negotiation open to all, and particularly as they are formalized and professionalized, they create an elite (Pallas, 2012 ) of what are effectively bureaucratic functionaries of global governance. Moreover, these elites are primarily from the Global North and are criticized for pursuing an elite-led advanced economy agenda for the international system. Structural imbalances are often cited between Southern and Northern participants because participation requires resources and this creates a Western bias (Gaventa & Tandon, 2010 ). Rather than seeing these actors as representing and advocating on behalf of voiceless constituents, Pallas ( 2012 ) sees a moral hazard and a lack of accountability in “global citizens” who propose policy solutions for which they may not bear the costs by intervening in problems that do not affect them directly. Participants may mistake as “global connectedness” what is in effect identity-sharing among elites. In addition, it is the institutional structure and the funding models of GCS, which have long been subjects of critique, that limit the ability of these groups to entreat the public to behave as global citizens (Desforges, 2004 ).

Richard Falk’s 1993 essay “The Making of Global Citizenship” describes the global citizen as “a type of global reformer: an individual who intellectually perceives a better way of organizing the political life of the planet” (Falk, 1993 , p. 41). This brings us to the assumption of causality which individualizes the emergence of GC in a quintessentially modern gesture which sees GC born of individuals who think critically and do not accept the organization of political life as they find it, but instead ask foundational questions and engage in utopian visions. Falk describes GC as “thinking, feeling and acting for the sake of the human species” (Falk, 1993 , p. 20). GC is thus an orientation toward the collective which begins in the individual with a specific kind of attitude, aptitude, and knowledge. Something peculiar is happening with the consolidation of GC discourse and scholarship. With its uniform emphasis on activism, the global-citizen discourse, whether it occurs in international organisations, corporations, global civil society, individuals or scholarship, has the effect of normalizing and shifting the normative orientation around political activism. This is a significant development given the context of the proliferation of political activisms since the 1960s and the wide variety of political mobilizations occurring on both the right and left of the spectrum in the 21st century . Moreover, the global-citizen discourse has the effect of legitimating the transnational agendas of certain activists (Pallas, 2012 ), and has resulted in a significant normative shift within global institutions in favor of the issues first brought to attention by antiglobalization activists of the 1980s and 1990s. This could be regarded with considerable skepticism as a form of co-opting, or with some relief as a welcome salve to chauvinisms of all varieties. Under the rubric of “GC,” the notion that globalizing capital might have any causal connection to political instability, environmental and health catastrophes, and growing inequality is seldom entertained, even as GC’s insertion into the Sustainable Development Goals sees the production of global citizens as the solution to global problems through the production of global “change makers.” Either way, there is a marked tension between two areas of scholarship in education and political science, where one sees in transnational advocacy the existence of global citizens, and the other sees in the globalization of education policy a strategy for their production.

The conceptualization of GC informs how it is studied. Optimistic scholarship observes what it considers to be organic expressions of GC in social movements, transnational advocacy networks, global governance, and among elite actors. Pessimistic scholarship observes the promotion of GC by elites and through private and governance institutions as a hegemonic strategy to contain and displace social movements; to institutionalize an epistemic paradigm which forecloses on critical thinking and non-Western, particularly indigenous knowledges; and to create a political subject which is amenable to globalizing capital (Bowden, 2003 ; Chapman, 2018 ). Across all this scholarship there are differing accounts of causality which traverse assumptions around human agency, social structure, technological change, and social engineering (Wendt, 1987 ). Technological determinant accounts attribute change to communications technology, top-down accounts attribute change to institutions and governance, and bottom-up accounts attribute change to individual and group agency. The latter two are complicated by the now very large field of GC Education, which has emerged from a combination of elite-led and social movement approaches to education in the 20th century . What is common to all is a characterization of GC as a change in the political subject. Despite the variety in conceptualization and definition of GC, the active, collective, and public element is consistent throughout. Across all the scholarship and debate there appear to be two central issues which require more systematic engagement. The first is the assumption that all forms of political activism are politically “progressive” (that is, in favor of human rights, political freedom, democracy, and equality); and the second is the assumption that GC is inherently neoliberal and therefore also inherently imperial.

A continuing blind spot in much of this scholarship is the concurrent rise of the right-wing political mobilization in various locations. This issue is debated in a volume in dialogue with Tully’s essay “On Global Citizenship” (Tully, 2014 ), and forms a substantive limitation in Tully’s account. Tully is overly optimistic that all forms of nonviolent contestation of civil citizenship are aimed at democracy, freedom, human rights, peace, and equality. He does not consider that alongside more “progressive” globally networked forms of activism are equally regressive forms of negotiation for more conservative and chauvinistic aims, sometimes enacted through violent means (Comas, Shrivastava, & Martin, 2015 ). Duncan Bell makes this criticism as well as raising the question of subject formation, which Tully leaves unaddressed (Bell, 2014 ). This is a notable absence in a time when the social engineering of GC is an active multilateral project. Part of this multilateral project is also an attempt to recapture youth mobilization away from the mobilizing tactics of various far-right or terrorist groups (Bersaglio et al., 2015 ; OECD, 2018 ; Sukarieh & Tannock, 2018 ). In the production of the “global citizen,” then, is also a contestation over what counts as politics, and Tully and other global citizen optimists fail to account for the potential weaponization of the political orientation and allegiance of young people.

Equally, Tully’s engagement in favor of GC is in tension with critical scholarship which sees in GC the continuance of an imperial project. Tully’s understanding of empire is reduced to Western European empire (as is it for most scholars critical of the Western tradition, including both postcolonial and decolonial). This is both one-sided and ahistorical and fails to consider the world historical development of empires in the plural and the fact that what Europe colonized at its periphery was, in many cases, other empires (Burbank & Cooper, 2010 ). There is a growing body of scholarship in International Relations (IR) which attempts to grapple in various ways, some more successful than others, with the peculiar absence of the history of empire from the discipline (Barkawi, 2010 ; Blanken, 2012 ; Colas, 2010 ; Dillon Savage, 2010 ; Go, 2011 ; Nexon & Wright, 2007 ; Spruyt, 2016 ); a growing body of scholarship which is calling for disciplinary decolonization (Abdi et al., 2015 ; Apffel-Marglin, 2004 ; Go, 2013 ; Gutierrez et al., 2010 ; Hudson, 2016 ; Taylor, 2012 ); and a growing body of historical scholarship which takes a comparative approach both to empires and to their role in constructing the international system (Burbank & Cooper, 2010 ; Darwin, 2007 ; Alcock et. al., 2001 ). The problem with the GC-is-imperial critique is that it has been made without a systematic engagement with the theoretical and methodological problem that empire poses for the social sciences. Equally, scholarship within IR that has begun to broach this question has done so without contending seriously with what postcolonial scholarship has done to further such an endeavor, or with how the reintroduction of empire poses serious problems for the very foundations of the discipline of political science (Biccum, 2018a ; Barkawi, 2010 ; Barkawi & Laffey, 2002 ; Mitchell, 1991 ). The recognition of empire and state co-constitution, which is made legible by the scholars who (in both history and historical IR) have begun to make empire an inescapable foundation of inquiry, necessitates a denaturalization of the state. Once the nation state is properly historically contextualized as embedded in imperial politics, the cosmopolitan debate over whether individual allegiance and identity is owed to state or humanity becomes remarkably hollow.

But equally, the state is as much a conceptual variable as GC, and a common critique of the methodological nationalism of much Western political thought and of the social sciences is that it has contributed to a normalization and naturalization of the state which is not consistent with the historical facts of the international system (Ferguson & Mansbach, 2010 ; Mitchell, 1991 ). Once this foundational problem that empire poses for how the social sciences have traditionally understood the state is properly engaged, scholars who value democracy, human rights, and justice have no choice but to normatively endorse GC, or perhaps, following Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy (Shiva, 2005 ). In addition, scholars need to be careful about continuing to brandish critiques of GC under the rubric of “neoliberalism” in an age of hegemonic decline (Biccum, 2020 ). If GC is indeed imperial, this claim must be made with a very robust understanding of what is meant by empire, which is among many other things, after all, also a concept (Biccum, 2018a ). Scholarship on GC needs to continue, as it has begun to do, to empirically map its usage, operationalization, and institutionalization, with a particular focus on how concepts do political work. The field, practice, and use of the concept is growing. Future scholarship should be paying close empirical attention to how, by whom, and to what purposes it is being used while engaging robustly with questions of norms, methods, and the politics of knowledge. Scholars across the different fields and different normative, theoretical, and empirical divides need to begin to speak to one another. Most importantly, scholars need to keep as the focal point of their inquiry how the concept of GC itself raises important foundational questions about how we should live.

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1. Derek Heater acknowledges that similar themes advocating world community and government can be found in the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese intellectual traditions (Heater, 1996 ).

2. This view has been problematized by scholarship occurring at the same time which examines the ways in which globalization has changed the state through the very same transnational governance structures that contemporary scholarship regards as empirical evidence for the existence of GC. For an account of globalization and the state see Clark ( 1999 ).

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What is Citizenship?

This essay will define and explore the concept of citizenship. It will discuss its legal, social, and political dimensions, the rights and responsibilities it entails, and how it varies across different nations and cultures. Additionally, PapersOwl presents more free essays samples linked to Citizenship.

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Citizenship can be described as a state of belonging to a particular nationality or country, where one can practice his or her constitutional rights within the country’s jurisdiction. However, citizenship requires more than the sense of belonging to a particular country. It entails several values, roles and responsibilities of a citizen and requires one’s commitment to his or her nationality. This paper will study citizenship and what it means for one to be a good citizen to his or her country.

It will also highlight the roles and responsibilities of a citizen in nation-building and what values good citizenship requires.

Various nations have different structures with regards to their citizenship in different social contexts. However, many structures are similar to others in several aspects. Birth the most assured way of becoming a citizen of a nation. Naturalization and registration can also enable one to be entitled a citizenship of a nation. In the modern day society, one can choose to have a dual citizenship, whereby he or she is recognized by two different nations as its citizen or one can also choose to commit his energy and tie to one nation. Many nations have similar conditions of obtaining citizenship by naturalization and registration. Therefore, it is crucial to note that one cannot obtain a country’s citizenship without some additional values being taken into considerations. One’s contribution to that particular country might be considered at times.

The main value of citizenship is creating positive impacts towards the development of one’s country. It entails engaging in unified activities with other people of the same nationality in an attempt to create a better society, (Sweet, 2006.) However, explanations on citizenship often take a socio-political course. In simple terms, the value of citizenship is closely attached to both social and political responsibilities, (Isin and Turner, 2002.) There are several social and political values that constitute to good citizenship. Many of these values are however dominated by both social and political virtues.

The first value of good citizenship is one’s concern about the welfare of other people, (Davies, Gregory and Riley, 2002.) This is one general point from which other points can be obtained. In simple terms, a good citizen should observe high standards of morals in social life, (Davies, Gregory and Riley, 2002.) An individual being concerned about others means that one will neither get involved nor advocate for violence in cases when there are two or more parties which seem to differ in ideologies. This value further calls for personal involvement in promoting peace and harmony. It also advocates in active participation in social welfares and organizations that champion for equal rights and equal treatment.

A good citizen should be patriotic in nature. However, the term patriotic may attract other definitions but in this case it is used to mean one’s commitment towards in serving his country. Patriotism is a crucial element of good citizenship, (Davies, Gregory and Riley, 2002.) In many cases, patriotism has been explained as the willingness of one to give up all, including his or her life for the sake of his or her country. However, many logical arguments are not often considered in this case. Instead of one being willing to die for his or her country, it could be prudent if patriotism could be seen as the willingness of one to live in order to offer his or her unlimited contribution in nation building. Some citizens often commit large-scale assaults on foreign nations and see their acts as patriotic acts due to this misconception.

Active participation in socio-political activities is also a value in good citizenship, (Konttinen, 2009.) Though, not all socio-political activities amount to good citizenship. For example, fighting particular groups in an attempt to secure political interest is not a sign of good citizenship. A good example of both social and political activities that can amount to good citizenship is voting. Voting is a constitutional right that enables one’s voice to be heard in electing leaders that will represent the interest of the voter. Voting is another way of creating order in a country whereby one’s participation in the exercise enables the establishment of a body that will ensure the peace is upheld and the state of affairs conducted in an orderly manner. Good citizenship creates can be a driving force behind the quest for justice, a matter that calls for the unity of purpose, (Sweet, 2006.)

The purpose of citizenship in a society varies from different social contexts, (Isin and Turner, 2002.) According to Isin and Turner, (2002), citizenship creates a sense of solidarity in the society. It enables the society to come up with a common goal and work in a unified way towards its realization. In simple terms, it helps the society to have a central focus or a common goal. Secondly, citizenship is important in the society as it gives an individual a sense of belonging. In this way, an individual is capable of feeling secure and accomplished as opposed to the feeling of stateless persons, who do not officially belong to a country and have no one to present their grievances to.

The world is slowly turning into a small village with several events unfolding in the world of technology. The world is no longer a vast spherical ball where movement from the East to the West could take long periods of time. This calls for a world citizenship plan, where all people can work in unity towards achieving common goals. This can be ensured by establishing a sovereign force that can effectively execute this plan, (Sweet, 2006.) It is hard to imagine what will be the impact of a united people committed to a common course of making the world a better place for anyone. Many environmental-friendly achievements can be made if the global population unifies its focus to this matter. However, that is almost impossible in the current setting where several groups have all established their own focus. A global unified focus can only be achieved by global citizenship and therefore, global governments should come up with a unified structure on World citizenship in order to create a better world for the quickly upcoming generations.

In conclusion, citizenship is an aspect that entails a variety of values, roles and responsibilities that are meant to hasten the economic growth of the nation. Its unifying nature should be taken advantage of and establish global citizenship in order to unite the world, considering the fact that many attempts have been made. Global citizenship can be helpful in eradicating major environmental problems by establishing a central focus in dealing with these issues. It will also be helpful in unity the global population and hence create a unity of purpose that can help a lot in pursuing issues of concern.

Davies, I., Gregory, I., & Riley, S. (2002). Good citizenship and educational provision. Routledge.

Isin, E. F., & Turner, B. S. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of citizenship .

Konttinen, A. (Ed.). (2009). Civic mind and good citizenship. University of Tampere.

Sweet, M. E. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: World citizenship and the imagination.

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6248 samples on this topic

A person can become a citizen of a country due to the right of soil or blood, change citizenship, get dual citizenship, and lose it. In simple words, everything is simple – but in reality, this topic is much deeper than that. It's a very good, deep, and interesting essay topic – and if you are going to write a citizenship essay, you've come to the right place.

Review essays (for example, "identity and citizenship"), expository papers ("citizenship and diversity"), persuasive essays ("the importance of citizenship for refugees," "birthright citizenship essay, " etc.), informative essays (say, a global citizenship essay that aims to inform the audience about this idea)... You will definitely have to write a lot of papers related to this topic. But don't worry – you can find any citizenship essay sample here, read it, learn about the writing practices of other writers, and come up with new bright ideas. There are dozens of samples here, and our database will definitely be useful for you!

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Citizenship essay.

Citizenship is both a legal status and a social identity. Legally, citizenship refers to an individual’s political status, rights, and obligations in a nation, for example, the right to political representation or participation in the judicial process in that nation. Socially, citizenship refers to an individual’s membership in a political organization or community. Whereas legal citizenship is closely linked to nationalism, the social conception of citizenship focuses on individual or group political ideology. In both, however, notions of morals, good standing, and social responsibility elements of so-called active citizenship are central to what it means to be a citizen.

Legal citizenship comprises several types. For example, in the United States, citizenship occurs through birth, naturalization, or, rarely, through an act of Congress and presidential assent. Any person born in a U.S. territory or from U.S. citizen parent(s) automatically becomes an U.S. citizen. In other countries, such as Japan, citizenship is based on jus sanguinis (bloodline) rather than birth. Subsequently, only those with biological Japanese parents or ancestors may automatically receive Japanese citizenship. In contrast to citizenship through birth or bloodline, in most countries, the naturalization process is lengthy and citizenship awarded only upon fulfillment of a set of cultural and financial requirements. These requirements measure the applicant’s degree of social, moral, and financial responsibility and, thus, worthiness of citizenship status.

Only legal permanent residents who have resided in the United States continuously for a minimum of 5 years, with no single absence of more than 1 year, can initiate the naturalization process. Exceptions are for non-U.S. citizens who have served in the U.S. military since September 11, 2001. These individuals can apply for expedited naturalization, which shortens by 3 years the time period non-U.S. citizen military personnel normally must wait before they can apply for citizenship. Also, expedited naturalization allows applicants to apply without being physically present in the United States during the application process. Nonmilitary applicants must be physically present in the United States for at least 30 months out of the preceding years. All applicants must be persons of “good moral character” for the preceding 5 years (1 year for military applicants and 3 years for applicants married to U.S. citizens). The government defines “good moral character” as lack of a criminal record. Noncitizens are ineligible for naturalization for criminal offenses ranging from murder conviction to involvement with terrorist organizations and for noncriminal activities including alcoholism or testing HIV-positive.

Nationalism is a central element of naturalized citizenship. Applicants must demonstrate proficiency in the English language and a fundamental knowledge and understanding of U.S. history and the principles and form of U.S. government. They must also show “attachment to” (i.e., a willingness to honor and obey) the principles of the U.S. Constitution. Taking the Oath of Allegiance legalizes this attachment. During this oath, applicants officially renounce any foreign allegiances and commit themselves to serve in the U.S. military (e.g., during a draft) and perform civic services (e.g., jury duty) when needed. Whereas some nations—such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States—allow dual citizenship, most require applicants to surrender one in favor of the other. Whether citizenship is achieved through birth or naturalization, in both instances U.S. citizens have both legal rights (e.g., of political representation) and legal obligations (e.g., jury duty). To date, however, only U.S. citizens by birth may run for presidential office, a stipulation that reflects a deterministic (biological) view of nationalism and citizenship.

Supranational citizenship extends the idea of national citizenship to an international level, as in, for example, the European Union (EU). The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 grants EU citizenship to citizens of all EU member countries and entitles them to supranational legal benefits, such as freedom of movement within the EU, the right of residence within any EU member nation, and the right to vote in EU elections. However, supranational citizenship is not a substitute for national citizenship; rather, both coexist. Last, honorary citizenship is, on rare occasions, bestowed upon non-U.S. citizens of extraordinary merit through an act of Congress and presidential assent. To this date, only six individuals have been awarded honorary U.S. citizenship, among them Winston Churchill in 1963 and Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa) in 1996.

The legal definition of citizenship focuses on legal and political rights, representation, and obligations. Social citizenship also involves rights and obligations, but within a social context; it can be used to indicate membership in a particular political community, for example, the lesbian and gay community. Within this social context, citizenship refers to identity politics, political ideology, and the perceived responsibilities that are associated with these politics, such as engaging in political activism or a particular lifestyle. Another form of social citizenship is corporate citizenship. Corporate citizenship does not refer to a corporation’s legal status but to its perceived contributions to (particularly the betterment of) a society. Corporate citizenship, like its legal counterpart, is synonymous with social responsibility, and it incorporates notions of “good” and “active” citizenship.

While legal citizenship is more deterministic in nature than is social citizenship, as witnessed in the birth-citizenship requirement to run for presidential office, ultimately both are socially constructed. Legal citizenship requirements and definitions of socially and morally responsible behaviors are culturally and historically specific. Therefore, the main purpose behind legal citizenship is the construction of national identity by forming ingroups and outgroups. Similarly, citizenship of political communities differentiates a specific community’s ideological thought or lifestyle from others in a society.

Ultimately, citizenship is as much a legal as it is a social concept and is often used in both contexts. What links the two conceptions together is the central-ity of ideas such as social responsibility, political rights, and identity politics.

Bibliography:

• Aleinikoff, Thomas A., David A. Martin, and Hiroshi Motomura. 2003. Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing.
• Aleinikoff, Thomas A., David A. Martin, and Hiroshi Motomura. 2005. Immigration and Nationality Laws of the United States: Selected Statutes, Regulations and Forms as Amended to May 16, 2005. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing.
• Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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By Minho Kim

Reporting from Washington

House Republicans are pushing legislation to crack down on voting by noncitizens, part of an effort to sow doubts about the election outcome and take aim at immigrants who they say have no business participating in elections in the United States.

They are planning to push through a bill this week that would roll back a Washington, D.C., law allowing noncitizen residents of the nation’s capital to vote in local elections. And they are pushing legislation that would require states to obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, in person when registering an individual to vote and require states to remove noncitizens from voter rolls.

Neither is likely to pass the Democratic-led Senate or be signed by President Biden, but both are ways for Republicans to call attention to their false claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens.

Former President Donald J. Trump has long claimed in the face of evidence to the contrary that presidential and congressional elections are susceptible to widespread voter fraud and illegal voting by undocumented immigrants who have skewed the outcomes in favor of Democrats — a charge that House Republicans have echoed.

Here are the facts about noncitizen voting and the false claims that foreign nationals swing close elections in one party’s favor.

More than a dozen cities and towns across the country allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

There has long been a policy debate in the United States about whether voting rights should be afforded at the municipal level to foreign nationals regardless of immigration status, as most of them pay comparable levels of taxes to U.S. citizens, contribute to their local economies and send their children to local schools.

Residents with foreign passports can cast ballots for candidates for mayor, school board, city council and commissioner in at least 14 municipalities whose state constitutions do not explicitly ban noncitizens from voting in local contests. Nearly all of the towns are in the deep-blue states of Maryland, Vermont and California.

Most local measures giving ballot access to noncitizens face court challenges. One such law in San Francisco that survived a legal challenge allows undocumented parents to vote for the members of their public school board. But in 2022, the New York State Supreme Court struck down a New York City law that gave partial voting rights to more than 800,000 noncitizens.

Noncitizens rarely cast ballots in local elections even when they are allowed to do so. In Washington, D.C., where roughly 15 percent of the 700,000 residents are foreign-born, only around 500 noncitizens had registered to vote as of Monday, according to data provided by the District of Columbia Board of Elections. The District has more than 400,000 registered voters.

It’s illegal — and extremely rare — for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.

Although noncitizens can vote in some local elections, they are barred by law from voting in federal elections for president or Congress, and research shows it almost never happens.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University looked at 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential election in more than 40 jurisdictions and found only 30 incidents of potential noncitizen voting — or 0.0001 percent of the votes cast.

An audit by the state of Georgia conducted in 2022 reached a similar conclusion after finding fewer than 1,700 cases of noncitizens attempting to register to vote in the previous 25 years . None of them were allowed to vote.

David Becker, the director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, said states had been “very effective” in ensuring that only U.S. citizens remain on the voter rolls for federal elections. That’s largely because of the Real ID act , which has required states to verify residents’ immigration or citizenship status before issuing an official identification card.

“There’s never been more transparency around these elections, and that’s verifiable,” Mr. Becker said. “There are very, very few people for whom citizenship status cannot be confirmed.”

Noncitizens have major disincentives to vote in federal elections.

Registering to vote draws the highest level of scrutiny from state officials and law enforcement, something that undocumented immigrants or those whose legal status in the United States is unsettled are exceedingly unlikely to want.

Those who have studied the topic say that immigrants have every reason to avoid calling attention to themselves in that way. Voting illegally is a felony that could entail jail time, a fine and deportation.

If a noncitizen “was caught registering to vote, or voting — this is actually a question on the citizenship exam — they will be deported,” Mr. Becker said.

Republicans and election deniers have cited faulty figures to suggest illegal noncitizen voting is widespread.

A witness at a House hearing last week on election integrity cited a faulty report from 2020 suggesting that around 15 percent of noncitizens routinely vote in federal elections. The estimate, to which election-deniers often refer, is based on an earlier study whose survey data appeared to indicate that a significant chunk of foreign nationals voted in 2008.

But those numbers are a result of unscientific cherry-picking from a survey of just 20,000 people designed for a different purpose, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank. A close look at the survey results shows that most of the respondents who said they were foreign nationals and had voted in the past were in fact American citizens who had mistakenly chosen the wrong answer to the citizenship question.

“These numbers simply aren’t believable,” Mr. Olson said. “They aren’t consistent with what we know from the various other sources.”

Still, Representative Bryan Steil, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Committee on House Administration, warned that the practice could spread. He pointed to a programming glitch in Pennsylvania that allowed noncitizens to register to vote and a review that found more than 100 noncitizens on Ohio voter rolls .

“American elections are for American citizens, and we intend to keep it that way,” Mr. Steil said.

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

After Skipping Lok Sabha 2024 Elections Alia Bhatt Shares Cryptic Post; Fans Talk About Her British Citizenship

Alia Bhatt recently was missing from the Lok Sabha 2024 Elections, while her husband Ranbir Kapoor was seen posing for the paparazzi after casting his vote in Mumbai. As the actress wasn't seen fans began to talk about her British citizenship and asking why she wouldn't opt for Indian citizenship after all these years. For the unversed, the actress does hold a British passport as she was born in the UK but was brought up in India.

ALIA BHATT DIDN'T VOTE! #AliaBhatt , born in Mumbai with a British passport, faces a dilemma between identity and convenience. Despite her strong connections to India, she holds British citizenship, a choice made by her parents because India doesn't allow dual citizenship. As she… pic.twitter.com/sKkF0Kuclo — PitchAndPopcorn (@RajnilSarma99) May 20, 2024

The actress hasn't been vocal about the same, but did mention her British citizenship during the press tour of her Hollywood film Heart Of Stone. When answering a quiz with co-stars Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan she revealed that her grandmother has lived in Birmingham but Alia was raised in India.

Now amid the questions about her British passport, the actress shared a cryptic post about love in her Instagram stories. She shared a quote from the book The Palace of Illusions – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni which said, "Love. There's no argument, no matter how strong, that can overcome that word.”

SEE ALSO: Watch: Akshay Kumar Casts His First Vote As Indian Citizen Before Leaving For London

Shame, Alia Bhatt holds British citizenship not indian.despite being born n raised in india n working in film industry ,it's such shame she can't even vote.i know her parents chose her to British but now she has right to choose but she doesn't.its such unpatriotic. #Viratkohli — Mahesh Patil 1717 (@1717Mahesh) May 20, 2024

Alia Bhatt didn't vote because of her British citizenship, people trolled Akshay Kumar for years, why is Alia Bhatt not talked about?? pic.twitter.com/tPclH4dxLs — Wellu (@Wellutwt) May 21, 2024

Meanwhile, on the work front, Alia Bhatt reportedly has wrapped up Dharma Productions' Jigra alongside The Archies actor Vedang Raina. According to reports she will also be seen in Brahmastra 2 as well as Love & War co-starring Ranbir Kapoor and Vicky Kaushal.

Alia is also confirmed to join YRF's spy-action entertainer with Sharvari Wagh.

Cover Image: Instagram

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